


Without You

by alp



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Action & Romance, Established Relationship, F/M, Mission Fic, Porn with Feelings, Smut, Some angst, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 21:55:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13397037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alp/pseuds/alp
Summary: Jyn and Cassian are sent on a mission that shouldn't involve any direct engagement. But then, of course, it does, and the way he feels about her becomes very, very clear.





	Without You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Starbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starbird/gifts).



She hadn’t seen him in a month.

He stood beside her as she passed their card through the scanner, his arm and leg brushing against hers -- light pressure, close, not close enough. The scanner spat at her. An organic housekeeper hummed and pushed his cart down the hall. The lift dinged, and a Twi’lek woman stepped out. Jyn furrowed her brow, tried the card again, slower. This time, the door opened, and an overhead light buzzed and flickered once, twice, and came fully on.

It was an old room, with yellowing walls and a worn and fading carpet, and it was small -- there was barely a meter’s worth of clearance between the door and the edge of the bed, and even less between it and the bureau, and the fresher had the dimensions of a side closet. Fine by her. It was bigger than where she usually bunked, and it was even odds whether they’d be spending any significant amount of time in it, anyway.

Cassian dropped his bag onto the bed and moved to the window. It was open; there was a cool breeze wafting through it, tinged with the scent of the ocean. It tugged at the curtains and, when he’d gotten close enough, his hair. He leaned against the wall, peered out. She kept her bag slung over her shoulder.

“How long do you want to wait?”

“A few minutes should be plenty.” He turned to face her. “Enough to look like we’re settling in.”

“Right.” She reached up to the strap of her bag, tightened her hand around it. She’d like more than that. Her skin had been crawling for the past three hours, down to the minute they’d joined one another in the briefing room. First time in a long time they’d been assigned the same mission. Less than that since she’d seen him, but that was plenty long enough, too. They hadn’t managed to sync up in the time that had passed between him getting home from his last operation and being tagged for this one, and a series of lingering touches under K-2’s faintly disapproving eye was not at all what she considered a proper reunion. It was a silly thing to be concerned with, she knew. There was work to be done, as there always was, and all that was needed was a bit of patience, anyway -- they’d be home and able to find the time soon enough. But still, here she was. Staring at the way his hair fluttered, like an adolescent, and thinking about her fingers in it.  

He made his way back toward her. His expression was soft. Not relaxed; it wouldn’t be, but there was a give to it. He retrieved his effects. She wondered why he’d dropped them at all. “You need anything, before we go?”

It was very, very hard not to smile or, at the very least, to smirk at him. “Not a thing.”

He nodded, slowly, the lines around his eyes crinkling. He touched her waist, stroking her side with his thumb. Well, all right then -- he was at least somewhere in the vicinity of the same page as her. “With any luck, we’ll be through by sundown, and won’t need to come back.” It could take several days for them to see what they needed, but it could also take an hour. And they were booking their room on a night-by-night basis.

She covered his hand with her own and rubbed his knuckles. Her gaze slid past him. The state of the blankets on the bed would probably concern her, if she thought too deeply about them. But she’d slept in much worse conditions. She side-eyed him. “Wouldn’t mind if we did.”

Air rushed through his nose. His hand slid around to the small of her back. His fingers tensed, dug in, released, and she shuddered, and struggled to keep her expression neutral. “I missed you, too, Jyn,” he said. She had a headscarf, down and draped around her shoulders; he ran one end of it between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand, then jutted his chin towards the door. “Let’s get this over with.”

The streets near the hotel were wide, straight, gridlike, carefully planned and dutifully maintained. The buildings that lined them had gleaming transparisteel fronts. Thick streams of pedestrians hugged the edges; landspeeders dominated the center. There weren’t any Stormtroopers about, but there were marks of Imperial influence, if one cared to look. The phrasing on signage, and in advertisements. The clothing and holovids in the store windows. The prominence of Humans. She thought about the Twi’lek woman. She thought about one of the marshallers she’d seen, a Sullustan; she thought of their concierge, of the collection of shopkeepers at one end of port, at a youngling running along, a package tucked under his arm. She thought,  _ how long? _   How long until it started affecting them, truly? According to the reports they’d read, there were areas where the effects were already apparent, where violence was, if not overt, then shimmering under the surface.

Would they follow up on that, after today?

Their focus, at the moment, was on the micro level, on Alliance-specific concerns. They’d been using a local weapons and munitions dealer for some time, and they’d had no illusions that she’d also been contracting with the Empire (Jyn found the hypocrisy distasteful, and so did Cassian, but the Alliance hadn’t many choices when it came to equipping themselves, and just ends could at times require concessions. They both knew exactly what that meant). But they now had reason to believe that she was selling information to them, and she’d possibly gone even further than that. Another agent had completed a purchase two days ago. A dead drop had been agreed upon.

Jyn and Cassian were headed to its location. 

They turned off the main thoroughfare. The streets narrowed; the scent of the ocean grew stronger, and the air blew cooler. Jyn’s boots crunched against something that, when she looked down, was indistinguishable from the sandstone. She experimented with her gait, trying for a less noisy step.

They came upon a place where the roads forked, curling around an imposing, duracrete building that was shaped like a wedge. She recalled the maps she’d studied on the way here, closing her eyes for a moment, squeezing them. There should be a storefront, to the left, and yes, next to it, an arch, over a stairwell. She couldn’t see the bulk of it, but her gaze followed its trajectory, upward, to a floor with long, narrow windows, spaced far apart.

Cassian hewed close. He curled an arm around her, and nudged her toward a point on the side of the wedge. “You take up position at that alley,” he said. “I’ll make my way to the roof over there.”

She leaned into him, looked up, and squinted. Getting into position would be a fair bit more complicated for him. “Be careful.”

He smiled at her -- brief, crisp, but it was there. He angled his head toward hers. “Always,” he said. 

He’d pressed his hip to hers. They were working. She’d missed him, and there was a twisting heat in her gut and chest. They were working. It was important. Later. Patience. He’d pressed his hip to hers. Her fingers twitched. She curled them into fists. 

“Three hours.”

She nodded her assent, and he broke off. She hurried across the street, tested her comm, double-checked the frequency. Patted her blaster, in its unfamiliar location, under her jacket, in a side holster. Slowed and stuffed her hands into her pockets as she neared the alley. It was empty of people, and it was narrow, and there were places where the buildings that bracketed it reached outwards, breaking up the path with tall, blocky abutments. It would be a pain to have to run down it. On the other hand, it would be a pain for anyone to follow her, and she’d gotten good at scrambling through tight spots, many, many years ago.

She decided that she approved.

There was a crate beside one of the nearest abutments. She pushed it toward the alley’s mouth and settled it along the wall, a handful of steps back from the street. Hopped up onto it, leaned back, lifted up her headscarf, draped it so that it hung low over her forehead. Left one leg dangling, heel knocking against the side of the crate. The other she drew up, and she slipped her datapad from her pack and rested it on her thigh. There were others like her, along the street, on stoops and in doorways and in other alleys. Lounging, loitering, waiting. She could be any one of them, and they could be her. She craned her neck, peering in the direction of the roof Cassian had indicated. He wasn’t in her line of sight; she hadn’t expected him to be. He was too good for that. But it would have been nice to see him.

The breeze abated, changed direction, then changed back again. Some far-off scent of food, thick and savory and unfamiliar, joined with the scent of the ocean.

An old memory tugged at her. She chose to ignore it.

A dense report, one she’d already read, scrolled beneath her forefinger. The stairwell to their building of interest was across the street, offset from her position by what looked to be fifteen meters, give or take a couple. She glanced at the chrono on her datapad. The window for the pick-up opened in five minutes. There was a good chance that Imperial officials wouldn’t show up today -- her heart skipped at the thought that they wouldn’t, silly thing that it was -- and a good chance, too, that they wouldn’t enter at all, not without first spotting Alliance personnel. Cassian had that angle covered from his position. If he could spot Imps moving into the area at the right time, then that was nearly as good a confirmation as witnessing them enter the building.

Jyn scanned the street. Filled with movement, beyond her fellow loiterers. People coming and going, entering and exiting, stopping to talk to one another. Carrying on with their lives, in the way that people all over the galaxy in all manner of places somehow still managed to do, despite the war, despite the shadow that was slowly darkening their skies. She supposed there had been a moment, once or twice, when she’d thought she could do the same. But she’d never been able to, either due to circumstances beyond her control, or due to her inability -- contrary to several assertions -- to ignore the reality around her.

A flicker of something caught her eye. It was more movement, in a sea of it, but it was different. Forward of the stairwell, almost directly across from her, was a side street, little bigger than her alley. There was a man there, Human, his back to her, gesturing at someone she couldn’t see. Bewildered, half-angry. She pressed her back harder into the wall, tugged on the end of her scarf. So he’d gotten into an argument, but… Whoever it was gave him a shove. He stumbled back a few steps, and into her view, gait rolling and cocky, came a Stormtrooper. 

She breathed in, sharply. Her gaze swung back to their target location. Nothing there, yet, but past it, at another side street, there appeared another trooper. The back of her neck prickled. Something felt off. She couldn’t have said what it was, but a good quarter of the reason she’d managed to survive for so long was that she had a decent set of instincts, and half the times she’d fucked up had hinged on her not trusting them. Her eyes shot up to the face of the building. 

Her comm crackled. She groped for it.

“Jyn.” Cassian’s voice was a low growl. “Get out of there. This isn’t what we thought.”

“How so?” There was a window, in her line of sight, and she thought she saw a shadow pass over it.

“There are already people inside the building.” He paused. “I don’t think Imperials are the only ones she’s been selling to.” 

She closed her eyes. That could mean just about anyone -- smugglers, a small-time gang, the  _ Hutts _ \-- but the end result was the same. It hadn’t affected them directly, given the thrust of their intel; the info the dealer had been feeding to this third party to be had to be Imp, not Alliance. And it made sense for her to go about it that way, because it wouldn’t truly jeopardize either. She was profiting off the war by playing both sides. She was helping other in-betweeners do the same. Jyn had seen plenty of that in her day.

She’d also seen it lead to the sort of confrontation that one didn’t want to be around for.

She collected herself and started down the alley.

“Stop,” Cassian said. “Hostiles.”

She sucked in a breath.  _ All right, they’ve established a perimeter. _   Turned back toward the street. There were hostiles that way, too, of course, but she’d be a lot less noteworthy there than she would be skulking in an alley. She kept her attention on the window. The shadow flitted past it again. As she moved, it resolved into a humanoid shape, and she saw their stance change, saw their arms draw inward and down.

She wondered what had happened in the dealer’s life to make her suddenly mishandle her dealings in such spectacular fashion.

“I’ll cover you,” Cassian said.

“Right.” She walked faster. “Don’t shoot my ass.”

He made a sound. “Don’t get made.”

The troopers she’d spotted a moment before had drawn closer to the target building. Foot traffic was being diverted. She glanced up, then back down, to the stretch of road in front of her. More troopers -- one, two, three. People began to walk faster, to lower their heads. They, too, knew something was up. She felt a spike of unease at the fact that they did, at the fact that this was  _ familiar _   to them. Stuffed it down, matched herself to them, hugged the store- and tenement-fronts. The rasp of a modulator came from behind her. She peered back over her shoulder, and saw yet another buckethead, stepping out from her alley. The perimeter was closing. Anxiety buzzed in her gut.

What were the Imps expecting to happen? Who the hell had this woman been dealing with?

Why couldn’t they have just one nice, quiet mission, where everything went exactly according to plan?

It wasn’t far to the end of the street, to the corner where she and Cassian had parted ways. From a strictly literal standpoint, they had succeeded. They’d come for confirmation, and they’d gotten it. They could skip out, now, and leave the criminals and the Empire to whatever it was they were about to do to one another. She rolled her shoulders, adjusting her pack. Almost there. Almost.

A mechanized gate opened, creaking on wrought hinges. Cassian’s voice sounded from her palm.

“On your left!”

Too late, by a fraction of a second. She stopped short, looked, slid her foot back, aiming to clear the way, but he clipped her, still. He wasn’t moving fast, but the plasteel was hard, its edges angled just enough to register as sharp, and his momentum was opposed to her own, so she stumbled back. She bent her knees and leaned forward. He swung to face her.

“Watch it.”

The anxiety morphed into something else. It smoldered in the space between her lungs and her ribcage, given life by the frightened postures of the pedestrians. She looked up at his helmet, at his not-face, and his not-eyes, and thought of every time in her past when she’d fallen into that nascent spark, when she’d decided that she didn’t care about much of anything except nurturing and venting her rage. Those times dovetailed quite nicely into the ones in which she’d failed to pay attention to her gut.

She thought of Cassian. Up there, watching her. Filled with rage himself, but tugging her back, calming her down. Force, she wanted to be done with this.

She angled her body so that she could discreetly pocket her comm. “Sorry.” The word tasted like ash. “Not looking for trouble.” Seasoned with bantha fodder.

He regarded her for a moment. She was very aware of her blaster, in its very unfamiliar spot. It burned into her side.

He stepped forward. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

She frowned. “Excuse me?” She heard a sound, from far off. Her pulse ticked up a notch.

“Don’t play dumb. I…”

The sound of blaster fire, muffled, drifted over to them, followed by a loud crash. Jyn’s head snapped to the right, to the stairwell and the building, in time to see a woman drop from the shadow-window and slam into the ground, her forearm bouncing, bouncing, and then coming to rest beside her. Screams filled the air. Nearby troopers dropped into defensive postures, cupped palms to their modulators. 

She looked back. It was before he did. Her heart pounded. There were troopers all around. She didn’t think she could get away with shooting him, but she didn’t think she could get away with just running, either. He already had an interest in her; there was a good chance he’d follow.

She’d have to act, and trust Cassian to follow up.

She stepped along his side, close enough to feel his knee on the inside of her thigh, and jammed her elbow into his neck. Grimaced at the impact. Didn’t waste time thinking about it. Her boots slapped against the sandstone. Grit shifted and scraped. The air was rent behind her; a thump followed. She reached up under her jacket. Her fist wrapped around the grip of her blaster.

The ground rumbled. It shuddered up through her legs and went out through her ears, and a wave of heat washed over her and nudged her to the side. She glanced up to see that their target location had exploded outwards, and that the shockwave was engulfing the thoroughfare.  _ Live ordnance.   _ She couldn’t believe it. A landspeeder wobbled, tilted, spun, careened in her direction, its driver screaming. She left the blaster in place and collapsed over her knees, folding her fingers behind her head. The speeder collided with the building beside her. It emitted a long, high-pitched wail, and then a part of it erupted, and a portion of duracrete wall groaned, leaned, and began to fall. 

She heard her own name. As she flattened herself, protected her head, muttered prayers rusted over with disuse, she heard her own name, distorted by electronics and distance but unmistakable, punctuated by terror.

“Cassian,” she replied into dust and sandstone. The comm was nowhere near her mouth.

There was a ringing in her ears. Not loud -- or, at least, not as loud as she would have expected it to be. The roar of her breaths overrode it, flowing in fast, crashing, rushing away. Dirt caked her tongue and the back of her throat. She coughed, blinked, peered into semi-darkness. Walked her fingers across the ground, and moved her legs, and kicked her feet. There was nothing on her, and the rubble around her was at a distance, close enough to touch, but not to hem her in. She flexed her muscles, a single group at a time. She expected pain, somewhere, at some point, but there wasn’t any. Well, there  _ was _ , but scrapes and bruises didn’t count. Talk about luck. She brought her hands under her shoulders and lifted herself up, slowly.

The back of her pack struck something. 

She rolled onto her side. Above her, there lay a beam of metal, wide enough to mostly obscure the sky from view. To one side of her head, there was a gap, long and triangular, its narrowest point down near her hip. Her headscarf had all but fallen off; she settled it around her neck, then gripped the lip of the metal. 

Beyond, there were clusters of blaster fire. Fewer screams, more shouts, angry, urgent. Cassian was no longer calling for her. She wanted him to be. Her chest contracted at the way he’d sounded (and contracted again, at the thought that followed, that pictured their positions in reverse). She’d speak to him once she’d gotten herself free. Reassure him. Run to him. 

She stopped, and went cold.

There was a Stormtrooper towering over her.

It wasn’t the same one. Cassian had shot him. But it was a fair bet that, whoever it was, they’d seen what she’d done, and what  _ he’d _   done, and they weren’t particularly happy about it. The barrel of their rifle was so close she swore she could feel the heat rolling off of it. Gloved hands tightened. The world slowed and went quiet.

She could feel her arm moving, feel herself reaching for her pistol, even as she knew, with icy certainty, that she wouldn’t be able to reach it in time. Her sense of self floated, disconnected -- not for the first time; she’d been here before -- and she...drained, went empty and numb, her heart stilling, as if preparing itself. She thought of Cassian. She imagined his face. Smiling (uncommon, but he did it around her, always around her). Hair in his eyes. Would she still feel the ache of missing him, when she was dead?

She hoped he wasn’t watching. She knew that he was.

The trooper cocked his head. Jyn gritted her teeth and lifted her chin. She’d go out looking down at him, even from the ground.

A bolt sped past her. A small, dark hole opened up in the center of the trooper’s forehead, tendrils of smoke rising up from it. He twitched backwards. She blinked, and watched as his head lolled and his body crumpled beneath him, slow at first, but gathering speed. He thudded to the ground. 

Her limbs went slack. She was out of breath, suddenly, and she gulped for air.

Cassian’s voice -- such a lovely sound, even when shot through with anxiety -- rose up from her pocket. She turned and looked up. She still couldn’t find him. He was good. Kriff,  _ kriff _ , he was good.

“Jyn! Jyn, are you alright?”

She fished out the comm. “Never better.” She looked back toward the dead Stormtrooper. Through her shirt, she grasped her Kyber crystal, the skin along her knuckles paling. Her arm shook. “You have a real knack for that.” For saving her, at the last possible second. For  _ being there _ . 

“And you have a knack for getting into trouble.”

“No argument there.” Even during those times when she’d tried, quite earnestly, to stay out of it, it had always seemed to find her. Then again, her “quite earnest” included a lot more loopholes than most people’s seemed to. She scrambled over the rubble.

“You should be clear.”

“Your doing?”

“Yes. Be quick.” The bodies would be replaced, and they’d be looking for a sniper.

She reached for her blaster. She wasn’t going to be caught unarmed again.

The wedge-shaped building had a hole in it. The street was choked with dust. There were corpses in her path, and debris beside them. There was smoke and ozone in the air. There were sirens. Locals hunched over, coughing and crying. 

Just one mission. Just  _ one _ . 

They regrouped around the corner, him skidding out from the rear of his building. There was a moment that strung out between them, thick with the reality of what had happened. It filled her lungs, heavy and hot, and made her gasp. But they weren’t safe, not really, not yet. There was an Imperial presence here, now; small, and mainly headed toward the site of the explosion, but there’d be more, and they’d be making broad sweeps. Jyn fell into step beside Cassian, their arms knocking together, and they hurried off. Dodged down a side street they hadn’t taken before, and then another, and another.

It was after they’d half-walked, half-jogged for a good ten minutes; after they’d sidled down a set of stairs among tightly-packed houses carved directly into a cliff face, where she could hear the ocean’s sighs and taste its salt, that he stopped, and turned to her.

She hadn’t seen him in a month. The reverse, of course, was also true, and he had been watching. If for some reason he hadn’t been able to take that shot, then he would have… She knew very well what that was like.

They were soldiers at war. People died in wars. That didn’t change anything. That didn’t change a Force-forsaken thing.

His brows were drawn outward and downward, his lips slightly parted. Breathing harder than he should have been. She felt a powerful sense of longing, looking at him, as if thirty standard days’ worth of it were dropping down on her all at once. She might have been gone. It was sticking in her throat, the meaning of that; the fact that, for once, it would have been her, leaving somebody else.

He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. One of his hands slid up the back of her neck, the back of her head. His fingers dug, hard, into her skull. He was shaking. She pressed her face into his shoulder and realized that she was, as well. The heat of his body was sharp. It ran through her, sparking like a live wire, and she gripped the fabric of his jacket and clutched him more tightly to her.

Gone! She wondered, again. Would she have felt it? Would she have known? Who the hell knew how death worked, for people like her? People who just had crystals. People who only prayed sometimes, and cursed existence at others.

For a long while, they didn’t speak, and didn’t move. It was long enough that her whole body filled with warmth, and the awful, half-disconnected rush of the day began to transform into a deep, stomach-tightening ache. At length, he tilted his head toward her ear. His breath poured down the slope of her neck and crept under her collar.

It was amazing how much almost dying could amplify a thing.

“I suppose we won’t be going back to the hotel,” she said. In her head, she tallied the amount of credits they’d just forfeit. It seemed like a terrible waste.

“No.” He sighed. “Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

“You have excellent timing.” K-2SO placed one hand on the stick in front of him, lifted the other to the panel on the ceiling. “Local officials have advised me that, due to recent events, there is a forthcoming lockdown on interstellar travel.” He turned toward the two of them. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with that, would you?”

Cassian slid into the pilot’s seat. The chair swiveled. He thrust his knee into the edge of the console, causing it to shudder back, and hastily drew down his headgear. Jyn dropped herself onto a passenger bench, at the edge of the cockpit. Braced herself against the wall. 

“No,” Cassian said. “Why ever would you think that?”

“You have a history. Also, you’ve returned ahead of schedule.” 

“There’s been a change in plans. I told you that there might be.”

The ship rose.

“That has no bearing on my question.”

Jyn sucked in a breath.

“Your question has no bearing on what we need to do.”

K straightened. He went still, in the total, uncanny way that was the province of droids. “That isn’t fair, Cassian.”

The minutes ticked by. There were no hails. There were no alarms.

Cassian sighed. Jyn watched his back.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”

She hadn’t seen him in a month.

She’d almost died. 

They hit atmo. The ship was jostled by it, and then it settled, and evened out. Fire rushed over the windshield. Dissipated. Gave way to stars, specks of light on a darkened canopy.

“The hyperdrive is ready,” K-2 said.

“I’m receiving Home One’s latest coordinates now.”

She wasn’t used to being on this end. She didn’t know what to make of it. She was warm, and aching, and fidgeting, and the constant was that people left  _ her _ . For better or worse, she only left when she knew she wasn’t wanted. That wasn’t the case here. 

The universe collapsed into a blue-white glow. Cassian glanced back at her. No, not glanced;  gazed. Stared. Peered into. She watched his chest rise and fall, watched his lips turn downward, watched his expression shift along some axis that she couldn’t properly describe. He yanked the headphones from his ears. They clattered against the console.

“If you don’t wish to wear your headgear,” K-2 said, affronted, “there is a hook, on the panel above and to your right.”

“Duly noted.” Cassian put a hand on the back of his chassis. “Take over for now.”

He stepped over to her. He didn’t need to say anything, and neither did she. He was close, his head tilted down, toward hers, eyes hooded, and she was leaning up, and their breaths were caught up in one another’s, and the thought was beating in her head:  _ I could be gone I could be gone I could have left you.  _ She could be  _ dead, _ without this, without him. Wasn’t the first time. Wouldn’t be the last, she was sure, and there wasn’t really anything they could do about that, short of ditching the Rebellion, and that option wasn’t and oughtn’t be on the table (and wouldn’t be any sort of guarantee, anyhow). But they did have  _ now _ , and they’d had a lot of “now’s” at this point, and it turned out that it had a damn lot going for it, more than she’d been able to give it credit for, back when she was alone and hungry.

He touched her hand. She nodded, and they hurried to the back of the ship.

It had been largely business, after their embrace. There’d been affection, but they’d been focused. And anyway, there had been K.

“I know what you’re going to do,” he called after them. “Don’t think that I don’t.”

Well, kriff it. The nature of their reality had landed them in more awkward spaces than this, and she had just gotten far closer to dying than was comfortable, and she’d  _ missed him _ , and he had that intense look about him, that gravity well forming at the slant of his brow and the curve of his lips and roping her in, threatening to tear her apart and render her the stardust that was so integral to her sense of self. 

She wanted him so fucking bad.

The door to the cabin swished shut. She could hear the air filtration system, could feel its pulse, gentle, against her skin and in her hair. They circled one another. They were always doing that. Flowing, sneaking up on what was there, even when they’d already learned the woof and weave of it. He reached up to her face. He gripped it, roughly, and she mirrored him. Her fingers traced the skin along his hairline, dipped into his hair. She grasped the back of his head. Their mouths met. One of her hands kneaded his neck; the other slid down to his chest and fisted in his shirt. 

He pressed his forehead to hers. “Jyn,” he gasped. Kissed her again. Breathlessly, artlessly. She bit his lip, and yanked at the snaps on his trousers, and he shoved his hands down into hers, digging his nails into her rear. There was a ringing in her ears, again, so like and unlike, and a fire in her gut, and she breathed deep, and was filled with the smell of him. She pulled his shirt over his head. His chest was heaving; his muscles were lean, not always palpable, but they were taut, right now, and moving with his breaths.

It made her feel young, younger than she was, young and stupid, but he was beautiful. She always thought it, always, and always felt a little silly, and always had to forget to care, and there were times when it was easier than others, and right now, right now,  _ Force _ . She helped him get her own upper half bare, and then back to him -- teeth and suction on his collar bone, a gasp, his body tightening. She wrapped her hand around him. He groaned and bucked his hips, and then grabbed her and pushed her toward the wall. 

There was an awkward moment, leaning down, hastily tugging off boots. She panted. Watched his skin glide over his pecs and biceps, watched the veins in his forearms appear and disappear, watched his throat work and his jaw set and his lips close and part, watched his eyes, darkening, roving over her, moving back up to her face. Focusing. Raw desire, on display, open to her. They had meant to get their trousers off too, surely, but before they could get that far, she reached for him. He planted one palm on her shoulder, the other on her waist, and gave her another shove.

“Jyn, I…” Face so close. 

She lifted up her leg, curled it around his thigh, and pulled him in. Nose to his. Hand on his neck, fingers pressed to the space just beneath his ear. The sensation of his hardness making her hips roll. Anticipation lighting coals in her belly. He dipped his hand between her legs and ran tight, focused circles. She bit her lip. 

“If you were gone…”

It was rare for him to get that close to being forthright. He’d said a lot of things to her, over the course of the time they’d been together, that were  _ almost _ , that made her heart pound from the implication, that made her at once elated and terrified. This was close, very close, and it meant more to her than he knew. She wrapped an arm around his upper back and closed her palm over his shoulder. Her other hand drew his face, his forehead, to hers.

“I couldn’t…” Take herself from him. “I won’t.” Not on purpose, and not if she could help it.

How scary a thought. 

He hooked one arm under her leg, shifted the other hand from her to himself, and guided himself into her. A quiet, gentle noise left his lips, at odds with his movements, which went erratic with need. One of his hands flew up and smacked against the wall. The fingers of the other sank into the curve of her ass, into the exposed flesh that lay just beyond the waistband of her trousers, split and rolled down. She clung to him. His thrusts were frantic enough for her back to chafe, and her head to knock against the wall, and she twined her fingers in his hair, squeezed until he groaned. She yanked his head back. Kissed him as ferociously as they were fucking. Gasped into his mouth.

It wasn’t always liked this. Not usually, not mostly. She liked their “mostly,” the slow-building heat of it; the steady, rising pulse of their rhythm, the softness of his eyes, the pliancy of his skin. His mouth on her, longer than she’d have ever thought someone willing, long enough to make her a writhing, incoherent mess. Right now, she didn’t think she could have handled that. The emotion in her was too wild, too intense.

He didn’t want to lose her. It was terrible and wonderful at the same time. It was a mirroring back of her own fear, of her own need. 

She wanted to see his eyes. She wanted to hold them in place. She wanted to watch him roll and buck and lose himself beneath her. 

She pushed down on his shoulders. He went still, looked up at her. His eyes were glassy, and his hair was fanned across his forehead. She held his head between her hands and mumbled against his lips, “the bunk.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded at her, and then her feet were on the floor, her body was filled with a familiar sense of  _ lacking _ , and she was dragging him to the bunk by a fistful of trouser-leg. An amused sound escaped him. His hands curled around her waist; he pulled her back to him, drew his lips and tongue down the back of her neck, moved them behind her ear, nipped at her ear lobe. The jolt of arousal that sped through her was just this side of painful. Her back arched. She closed her eyes, squeezed his hand, urged it forward, over her abdomen.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, his voice low and husky and raw.

Oh, hell. It seemed he'd saved her life just so he could go and kill her himself.

It was hard to speak, for a moment, she was so overcome. With want, with desperation, with the need for affirmation. She bit her lip, faced him, and set her jaw. 

“Get on your back.”

His eyes tracked up and down her face. Lips twitched, slanting upwards. Hands drifted over her, as he stepped around her, as he complied. She coaxed his hips up, and he propped himself on his elbows, watching her as she did away with the last of his clothing, and then the last of hers.

He said her name. He’d said it a lot, in the past several minutes, and with a certain sort of conviction. She couldn’t remember anyone ever saying it like that, but he’d been saying it that way for a long time, for most of the time they’d known one another. The thoughts tumbling around in her head were disjointed. Her body felt like it had been filled up with sun.

She bent down and licked him once, from base to tip, tasting herself, thrilling at his intake of breath, and then crawled up and settled herself onto him. He reached for her, of course, immediately, but that wasn’t what she wanted.

“No.” She grabbed his wrists, pushed them behind his head, folding one over the other. With one hand, she pinned them down. He arched his eyebrows, then smiled, after a beat, and she grinned back at him. He’d told her, once, that he liked it when she took control -- almost as much as she liked doing it. The fingers of her free hand traced his jaw, his stubble pricking the tips, and slid down, along his sternum and the curve of his ribcage; back up, palm flat, bracing against one of his pecs when she began to move. His skin was hot where they were joined. He was firm between her thighs, every part of him that she could feel, and the hollow of his throat was working, and he was meeting her as best as he could, and his  _ eyes _ \--so deep, so dark. 

He didn’t want to lose her! She’d wondered, Force help her, if she felt more deeply than he did, because that had been her whole life, hadn’t it? She’d develop an attachment (at first because she was too young to know any better, and then because she was apparently too stupid to do any different), and she’d be rewarded in the end with the sobering knowledge that she hadn’t meant nearly as much to them as they had to her. Even with him coming back for her, she’d wondered. She’d worried that she was setting herself up once again, that her stupidity was angling to get the better of her.

No, no, it wasn’t that way. It wasn’t that way at all. And she was  _ alive _ , and she might not have been, and here they were, here they were, and she’d missed him, so much.

She whimpered and leaned forward, planting her hand on the wall behind his head. She slammed her hips against his, as hard and fast she could, dropping her head, knocking it against the side of his, the corner of her lips grazing his cheek. He panted into her ear and bucked up into her. The muscles in his arms contracted. They weren’t syncing; there was no finesse to this, but it didn’t matter. It might even have made it better.

“Please.”

It came out as half a moan. Her head snapped up.

“What?” She had to slow down to look at him properly. His face was slack with desire.

“Let me touch you, Jyn.” His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rapidly. “Please.”

That near-painful jolt, again. She gulped, nodded, and released him.

He wasn’t gentle. He clawed at her, and she relished it. He tangled his hand in her hair and tugged, exposing her throat to him, sucking on it, scraping his teeth against her jaw. He kneaded her sides and back; grabbed her breasts and rolled her nipples between his fingers; slipped a hand between himself and her and rubbed. He crushed her face between his hands, locks of hair bunching around them, and kissed her deeply and ardently, his lower half jerking up into hers all the while. She slid her legs back. She moved, adjusted, until her chest was flush with his, until her clit was pressed against his body, until she could feel his skin along most of hers, until her desire overtook her and she keened into his mouth. 

The way he looked at her when she came was beautiful. The way he looked when he followed suit was beautiful, as well. Always was. She supposed she should just go ahead and start acknowledging that.

They cycled downwards into calm. Spent long moments catching breaths. 

The ship sang all around them. She lay on his chest, her arm draped over his stomach. He toyed, absently, with her hair. She had no idea where the tie for it had gone. Her body was limp and tingling. 

“Think we’ll go back there?” By “we,” she meant the Alliance. With two fingers, she traced his hip bone. The skin there was pleasantly soft. 

“I’m not sure. If we do, then I doubt you or I will be involved.”

Of course they wouldn’t be.

She frowned and shifted, moving her ear over his heartbeat. It was silly to be talking about this now, almost as silly as it had been to think more about wanting him than about doing their job. It wasn’t that it wasn’t worth her concern; it was. What happened to the people there mattered (a sentiment she might not have admitted holding, only a couple of years before). It was that it didn’t fit at all with the moment.

She held him. Closed her eyes, turned her head, buried her nose and half her face in his flesh. They almost hadn’t had the time. She didn’t leave people; they left her. But this time around, this time… 

She couldn’t say it, any of it (and that’s what so much of her frenzy had been about, hadn’t it? Suppressing the emotion and the words with action). A part of her wanted to, very badly, but she couldn’t get it out, and there was a panic rising in her chest at the thought, warring with the elation of earlier. It was a precious thing to know something of the extent of his feelings for her. But she also knew, now, that she had the power to hurt him as deeply as others had hurt her.

And she wouldn’t even have to do it willingly. 

His arms tightened around her. She felt his muscles flex, and assumed he was raising his head. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” She swallowed. “I don’t…” Clenched her jaw. There were so many things she’d done in her life that should have been harder than this. She took a deep breath, pushed back against the panic, and blurted out, to her surprise, “I don’t want to die without you.”

He went stiff. So did she.  _ What the hell kind of thing is that to say? _   And after sex, no less. They’d been together for a while now. One would think she’d have started getting the hang of it. But no, no. Apparently not.

The silence stretched. Her heart thumped. She should say something. She should take it back or cover it up somehow or, better and most terrifyingly yet, say what she’d actually meant to, whatever that happened to be.

“I don’t want you to die at all,” he whispered, at last. His voice was strained.

She blinked back tears. “Neither do I.” Her body was half atop his, now. She dropped her hand down and grasped the bunk’s fitted sheet, curling her fingers until she could feel her nails through it.

He plucked her hand from the sheet, wound his fingers through it, and squeezed.

“Then let’s try not to.”


End file.
